A member of the IT Crowd at a Missoula company crashed his former employer’s computer system just days after being laid off.

According to the Missoulian newspaper Vladimir Ivanovich Shved worked as an IT administrator at Edulog which provides software for school bus routing and scheduling in Missoula.

He was laid off in October and prosecutors claim that several computers crashed nearly simultaneously and when employees tried to restore the systems, they found the backup servers had been erased.

Court records say the company called Shved and offered him an hourly rate to help resolve the problem, but refused his demand of a three- to five-year contract at $100 to $150 an hour.

Edulog started to suspect that maybe Shved had a hand in trashing the network and started its own investigation.

Ironically his cunning plan might have worked if he had not asked for such a daft condition for a return to work.

He told the judge he was sorry about what happened and it was the biggest mistake in his life.

Larson seemed to believe him and sentenced Shved to three years on a felony charge of unlawful use of a computer but deferred it. A deferred sentence means Shved's record will be clean if he stays out of trouble during that time.